Before you even begin to build a website you need to develop a plan for attracting traffic to your website. This is important to do before you begin creating your website because you will need to optimize it to be “search engine friendly” so that you can rank high up in search engine results, otherwise you will not get as many visitors to your website as you could had you taken advantage of the various methods of increasing your rank in search engines. This is known as SEO, a common marketing technique used by both professionals and hobbyists alike.

How search engine optimization works is you create content for your website that has certain keywords that a search engine, such as Google, can easily pick up on. It does not have to be a single word; it can even be a short phrase. When someone searches for that word or phrase in a search engine, the search engine will bring up the most relevant websites depending on how often the keyword or phrase is used in the content of the website. Now while it may look like the more often you use the keyword the better, this is not true. More is not always better, kind of like taking medicine. You need the correct amount because if you use a keyword too many times the search engine will know that you are just trying to get the engine to pick up on the website, and it will skip over your website decreasing your rankings. You need to focus on keyword density, which is how often the keyword is used throughout your content while taking into consideration the length of the content.

Different search engines have different keyword densities they look for, but a safe number to shoot for is anywhere between 2% and 4%. This will make sure you get the keyword into your content enough times to be picked up on, while keeping it from being overused.

So how are you supposed to know which keywords will work for you? While it depends on what your website offers, a great tool to help you is Google AdWords. This tool allows you to type a keyword into its search bar and it will give you statistics on the keyword including how often the keyword is searched and how many websites try to take advantage of the keyword. You need to take into consideration how much competition you have for a keyword because that will greatly diminish how much traffic your website will receive if you try to compete against those websites for that specific keyword. Many websites get a majority of their traffic from their longtail keywords. Longtail keywords are keywords that are not used by a lot of websites, yet they aren’t as popular. You should look into these when deciding on what words you will be taking advantage of because less competition means more traffic!

Once you have your keywords selected you can begin to develop content for your website. If you are not a good writer you can hire a freelance writer online to write content for your website. Freelance writers are great at writing SEO content because they do it for a living, so they will be able to find the right density of keywords for your website.

You can now start developing your website. Once it is complete submit it to search engines and watch your traffic rapidly grow!